Big Moe

BIG MOE

“I was eight, I think, maybe younger, the first time I passed a sandlot and saw a bunch of kids playing baseball. I watched those kids, some my age, others older, kids of all ages, and I thought: I can play that game. I can hit that ball.”

Hitting the ball, that’s what hooked me. I didn’t have a glove. The kids had little gardener-type gloves, flimsy leather or cloth, the fingers separate, no webbing, but I went out there with no glove and caught balls bare handed. Right off, a bigger kid maybe fifteen or sixteen, an Irish kid named Kelly, smiled at me and told me I had ‘good hands’. He let me use his glove to shag in the outfield. I watched the other players. I knew I could do what they were doing. Some of them could hit the ball, others struggled. I saw where they struggled. They swung too hard or swung up on the ball or they looked away when they swung and missed, or stepped away from the ball because they were a little scared, or they held the bat wrong with their hands, didn’t have their knuckles lined up right, and Kelly, he showed me how to line up my knuckles so that my top knuckles lined up with the top knuckles of my other hand, though later, when I’d developed a philosophy of  hitting, I often lined up the knuckles of both hands for better bat control, especially with two strikes on me.”

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“The first time I swung a bat I cracked a line drive. Just happened. But everybody took notice. Kelly watched me hit a few more, and said: You’re a natural, kid, you got good whip in your swing. You got wrist action. You’re gonna be a ball player. You’re gonna play on my team, kid.”

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“I rode my bike into another neighborhood to get away from the goddam Polocks and Germans, and I saw right away that if I could play baseball, well, I’d be accepted anywhere. I had a free pass. Here I was, from another neighborhood clear across town, in somebody else’s territory during a time in Chicago when people seldom strayed from their home turf, and because it looked like I might become a decent ball player, this kid

Kelly, who ran the neighborhood, wanted me back, took me under his wing. He told me to get myself a glove, and that’s what I did. I found a goddam gardener’s glove to keep the ball from stinging my hand. When you start out with a glove like that you have to make sure to watch every ball into your hand and use your free hand to corral the ball, and it ends up making you a better fielder down the line when it’s time to get a bigger, better glove.”

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“Now, everything changed in my life. Baseball took precedent over everything, including school. All I thought about in school was getting on my bike and sailing the few miles to the sandlot to play baseball with the Irish kids. They didn’t care if I was a Jew or a monkey with a tail, as long as I could play ball. I was more than welcome. Was somebody to respect and be treated like an equal. Hell, I could run and I could throw, talents you can’t learn. Even at a young age I could outrun most of the kids, and I realized also that I had exceptional reflexes and reactions to balls hit and pitched to me. When summer came, I played morning, noon and evening, came home late for dinner every night and received a beating from my father, who warned me he’d beat me with the strap every time I was late, but already I loved baseball so much that getting to play an extra hour was worth the beating. My mother, she didn’t like the strappings every night. But my father was the ruler of the household, and though they fought over these nightly strappings, he got his way.”

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